The Yakama Nation is moving to ban marijuana in all 10 counties of its ancestral lands, covering one-fifth of the state’s land mass. …

…under the Yakama Treaty of 1855 with the federal government, the tribe was allowed to maintain fishing, hunting and food-gathering rights on more than 12 million acres of its historic lands that were ceded to the United States. Now they want to use those rights to include a ban on marijuana on all ceded lands. …

One minor problem with the article: it’s wrong. The Yakamas are not currently proposing to ban marijuana use or possession anywhere except on their own reservation. (Which is still a bad decision, in my opinion.)

What they are doing is filing official objections to over 600 license applications for marijuana-related businesses. These businesses would all be located in a large area of central Washington that was ceded by the Yakamas to the United States in an 1855 treaty.

The central issue is “ceded land“. In 1855, the Yakama confederated tribes were pressured into signing a treaty under which they ceded most of their ancestral territory to the government, and agreed to relocate to a much smaller reservation. The Yakamas retained only limited rights on the ceded land:

…the right of taking fish at all usual and accustomed places, in common with the citizens of the Territory, and of erecting temporary buildings for curing them: together with the privilege of hunting, gathering roots and berries, and pasturing their horses and cattle upon open and unclaimed land. …

Now, this doesn’t sound much like it includes the right to overrule state law. Nevertheless, that is what the Yakama leaders are claiming. From the Yakima Herald-Republic article:

…The tribe’s options include suing the state in federal court if no compromise can be reached, Yakama Nation Tribal Council Chairman Harry Smiskin said.

“We’re merely exercising what the treaty allows us to do, and that is prevent marijuana grows (and sales) on those lands,” Smiskin said. …

“To my knowledge, this would be the first time” the tribe has sought to prevent the implementation of a state law on all ceded land, said George Colby, an attorney for the Yakama Nation.

“The tribe’s stance is if you don’t fight, you don’t get to win,” Colby said. …

I don’t think the Yakama Nation leaders are acting in the best interests of their own members here, but it’s even more aggravating that they want to impose their nanny-state attitudes on their neighbors.

The Daily Mail published this widely-circulated image (based on NASA data) last September:

Climate-change scientists are often accused of “cherry-picking” their data, but the Daily Mail takes this to a new low. Here’s the arctic sea ice extent for every August from 1978-2013, courtesy of the National Snow & Ice Data Center:

The Daily Mail’s selected images represent the last two data points on this graph.

In brief, the authors mined some data from a large survey taken in 2008-2009, and they claim to have found a correlation between racial resentment of whites against blacks, and the likelihood of whites to own guns or be anti-gun-control. Only data provided by US whites were used in this study.

To determine the level of “symbolic racism” (racial resentment that falls short of outright anti-black bigotry), they used these four questions:

Irish, Italians, Jewish and many other minorities overcame prejudice and worked their way up. Blacks should do the same without any special favors. [Agreement = racist]

Generations of slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class. [Disagreement = racist]

Over the past few years, blacks have gotten less than they deserve. [Disagreement = racist]

It’s really a matter of some people not trying hard enough; if blacks would only try harder they could be just as well off as whites. [Agreement = racist]

For a measure of overt racism, they used this question:

How well does the word “violent” describe most blacks? [“Extremely well” or “very well” = racist]

They also used data from an “Implicit Attitudes Test” — I’ll let the authors describe this one:

…the race IAT was administered online, requiring participants to rapidly associate pictures of white and black faces with positively- and negatively-valenced words. Participants were asked to press the key “P” for white faces and for positive words and “Q” for any other stimulus. Alternatively, they were asked to press “P” for black faces or positive words and “Q” for other stimuli. … This score is coded so that positive scores indicate an unconscious preference for whites over blacks.

Regarding guns, survey participants were asked whether they were gun owners and whether a gun was present in the home. They were also asked their opinions on whether gun possession in the home or licenced concealed-carry should be legal.

There were also various statistical tests and adjustments based on assorted other questions (conservatism, political party, gender, geographical location, income, etc.). I didn’t attempt to understand all these details.

The results:

After adjusting for all explanatory variables in the model, symbolic racism was significantly related to having a gun in the home. Specifically, for each 1 point increase in symbolic racism [on a 5-point scale], there was a 50% greater odds of having a gun in the home, and there was a 28% increase in the odds of supporting permits to carry concealed handguns. … Higher IAT [Implicit Attitudes Test] scores were not related to gun ownership and gun control in full models. Higher scores on black violent stereotyping were not related to any of the gun-related outcomes…

So…

No correlation with black violent stereotyping. (Although you could argue that nobody answered this question honestly.)

No correlation with “unconscious preference” for whites over blacks.

Positive correlation with so-called “symbolic racism”. I’d say there’s some room for disagreement about whether these four questions are measuring only racist attitudes. Conservatives and libertarians might be inclined to see in these questions some assumptions about the proper role of government in creating socioeconomic equality, and answer accordingly. Coincidentally, conservatives and libertarians don’t much like gun control. Duh.

As for the authors, they are blatantly anti-gun and make no effort to hide it. They refer to pro-gun attitudes as “paradoxical” and not “logical”, and they say that “gun control policies may need to be implemented independent of public opinion.”

Although the authors are careful to note that “the correlational nature of the study clearly prohibits causal inferences”, in the very next paragraph they state that “anti-black prejudice leads people to oppose [gun control] implementation”, which sounds exactly like an assertion of causation to me.

My opinion: the only important conclusion here is that there is no correlation between overt racism (“black violent stereotyping”) and pro-gun attitudes. The rest of the study tells us nothing.

One out of four young U.S. Muslims believe homicide bombings against civilians are OK to “defend Islam,” according to a new poll. …

The study found that among the nation’s younger Muslims, 26 percent say homicide bombings can at least rarely be justified “in order to defend Islam from its enemies.”…

The survey results can be read here (Pew Research, PDF file). The survey does in fact state that, for US Muslims aged 18-29, 15% say suicide bombing of civilian targets may “often” or “sometimes” be justified, 11% say it is “rarely” justified, and 69% say it is “never” justified.

% who believe that it is “never” justified for “an individual person or a small group of persons to target and kill civilians”:

Muslims

89%

Protestants & Catholics

71%

Jews

75%

Mormons

79%

No religion/Atheist/Agnostic

76%

So what does this tell us? Obviously, US Protestants and Catholics are 2.6 times as scary as US Muslims!

Really (in my opinion), both polls are worthless. How many people were willing to answer truthfully? I mean, especially with the NSA, FBI, etc monitoring everything (and this was certainly suspected in 2010 when the Gallup poll was conducted, even if Snowden’s leaks hadn’t proved it yet). The Gallup link (down at the bottom) discusses their methodology, and I am highly dubious — certainly they selected for Muslims who had already shown willingness to answer poll questions, who might therefore be less terroristic than the “average” Muslim.

In any case, the biggest flaw with the Fox News article is that it ignores the lack of poll data on non-Muslims. It just leaves us to assume, without evidence, that non-Muslims couldn’t possibly be as violent as that. In addition, it selects the scariest-looking demographic (young Muslim men), and adds up the numbers for often + sometimes + rarely justified, to generate the biggest possible scary number.